How do we separate the seemingly inseparable?

Your cell phone is mainly made of plastics and metals. It’s easy to appreciate the process by which those elements add up to something so useful. But there’s another story we don’t hear about -- how did we get our raw ingredients in the first place, from the chaotic tangle of materials that is nature? Iddo Magen uncovers the answer in a group of clever hacks known as separation techniques.